Are you or someone in your church interesting in singing more hymns? At his blog In Light of the Gospel, James Grant shares a few suggestions for bringing hymns to a congregation that isn’t used to them.
Show them the beauty and importance of theological expression in music.
Hymns aren’t always fonts of eloquent truth, nor are more contemporary praise forms unable to say rich things about God. But Grant obviously believes that the average hymn (still surviving) will be more meaningful than the average praise chorus hot off the press. If you’re already thinking about crossing over, you probably agree with him, and you have to think about how you want to talk to your congregation about that. He suggests discussing how “learning hymns is a way to participate in the church universal and the communion of the saints.”
Introduce one hymn each month. You can’t spend all your worship time learning new music, and you need to give people time to get comfortable with new melodies and words, especially when they might have a different feel from the music you’ve always done.
Plot out a strategic long-term schedule. In tandem with the previous suggestion, you could line up new hymns with significant times in the church calendar. For instance, as we’re now four weeks away from Good Friday, you could start to introduce “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”
This can obviously be a divisive topic, so even if the leadership in your church is in agreement about using more hymns, some of your members probably aren’t. Has anyone’s congregation worked through a transition like this? What did or didn’t work?
